On Tuesday, about fifteen seconds before Nick started an absolutely riveting lecture on pornographic Peruvian pottery and Greek brothel murals, Bodie arrived to class. I expected him to make his way down to the spot where most of the football team was sitting together, but instead, he dropped his backpack and sunk down into a seat three rows from the back—directly across the aisle from where Andre and I were.

Naturally, I started running through every plausible reason he'd have for choosing the closest open seat to me.

Hadn't we agreed we were good (whatever that meant)? Weren't we done?

When Nick finally powered off the projector and closed his laptop with a reminder to finish reading chapter eighteen before Thursday's lecture, I felt like I'd just chugged three cups of black coffee.

On edge. Jittery. Needed to pee, just a bit.

"Damnit," Andre mumbled beside me, "What was the last slide? I was working on my calligraphy."

I glanced over at his notebook, where he'd written—in devastatingly beautiful penmanship—fuck bitches get money.

"Um... sorry, I zoned out."

I slid my own notes into my backpack (before Andre could see that I hadn't written down anything substantial in the last hour and a half) and popped up out of my chair.

In the same moment, Bodie stood from his and stepped into the aisle, blocking my escape route.

"Hey," he said.

My heartbeat said it's go time.

"Hi," I said.

"I was hoping we could have a quick team meeting."

I told myself it was relief, not disappointment, that made my shoulders sag.

"Oh, yeah. Sure."

Andre cleared his throat behind me. I scooted to the side, so he and everyone else in our row could get around me, but he stopped at my side to glance pointedly at Bodie, then back at me. I didn't like his smile. It was the smile of someone who was reading too much into things.

"Catch you later, Cates," Andre called over his shoulder as he left.

"I'll see you—see you soon," I flubbed.

Then I turned back to Bodie.

"How's Hanna?" he asked.

"She survived."

Bodie waited for me to elaborate. I didn't, so the two of us just stood side-by-side in silence, shuffling back and forth in the aisle to stay out of everyone's way, until we caught Ryan and Olivia on their way to the doors.

"Yooo!" Ryan greeted, with more elation than the situation called for. "Squad's all here!"

"Hey, man," Bodie greeted, indulging him in a fist-bump. "I'm sorry I didn't show up at the library last week. I had this meeting with my coach and—"

"Don't worry about it," Ryan said.

This did nothing to ease the pinched expression of guilt on Bodie's face.

"Can we meet tomorrow? Maybe five, if that's not too late?"

"Works for me," Olivia said. Ryan nodded in agreement.

Bodie looked to me, eyes bright with hope.

So I said, "I'll be there."

❖ ❖ ❖

When I arrived at the study room Olivia had reserved for us in Buchanan, I was hit with a double whammy of mildly unpleasant surprises—first, that I was the last of the group to arrive (Bodie already had his notes laid out and everything), and second, that the minuscule workspace we planned on bunkering down in for the foreseeable future was disconcertingly warm.

"Is it really hot in here?" I asked, shedding my backpack and jean jacket in a move I suppose made the question rhetorical.

Olivia looked up from her notebook and nodded in solidarity.

"Hot as balls," Ryan concurred.

I dropped into the seat between him and Bodie, who I was sure I felt watching me as I set out my own notebook and pens. The study rooms were small to begin with, but he dwarfed them. I reached up to brush back my hair, a bit self-consciously, and discovered the spaghetti strap of my sundress had slipped off my bare shoulder when I'd tugged my arms out of my jean jacket.

"So I'm thinking," Olivia began as I righted my rogue strap discreetly, "we should start by going over the outline?"

I glanced at Bodie. He stared unwaveringly at his notebook.

Maybe I'd been mistaken about him watching me—although his cheeks did look flushed, but that was probably due to the heat. He was wearing a charcoal grey long-sleeved shirt. He'd rolled it up to his elbows, but he still had to be baking in it.

"I read through it last night," he said to Olivia. "Looks really good. I'm happy to cover the sections you guys don't want."

It was the response of a true people-pleaser.

"Oh," Olivia said, unable to hide her surprise. "Well. That makes it easy. I guess we can get right to prepping for La Ventana."

La Ventana was a Mexican restaurant in east Los Angeles whose reputation had been built on their table-side guacamole and a thriving line up of drag queens who performed karaoke there on weekends.

"Alright, so, we should try to get there before six," Olivia said, reading from her laptop. "The acts start at eight, and I want to have plenty of time to talk to Dulce D'Leche. She said she's down for an interview, so she'll come earlier."

"Should we Uber?" Ryan asked.

"It's like an hour away," Olivia said, scrunching her nose. "It'd be way better if one of us drove. I mean, I don't have a car, but if someone does—"

She glanced at Bodie and me.

I thought of my car, still tucked on the third floor of the overflow parking garage across from The Palazzo, and sunk lower in my chair.

"I'll drive," Bodie volunteered. "I can borrow my roommate's car. He owes me."

I sagged with relief.

That was it. I'd never bitch about him being a people-pleaser again.

With our method of transportation decided upon, we turned to the next bullet point on our agenda: brainstorming questions.

"Okay, so, Dulce D'Leche started doing drag about ten years ago, and—" Olivia began reading off her notes.

"What pronouns does Dulce use?" Bodie interrupted.

"She-her when she's Dulce, he-him when he's not in drag."

Bodie jotted this down and underlined it twice.

As Olivia continued with a short biography of Dulce D'Leche, I watched Bodie out of the corner of my eye. He made another note of something she said. Then, in the margins, he started drawing little, looping designs before he caught himself, dropped his pen, and propped his elbows up on the table, focusing his undivided attention on Olivia.

Under the table, he started bouncing his knee.

I don't think he even realized he was doing it.

"Do you think we can ask what his parents think of him doing drag?" Ryan said. "I don't know if they're, like, conservative and shit."

"Yeah, that could be a sticky one," Olivia said, scrunching her nose. "I'll ask it."

"I think Laurel should," Bodie piped up. When I shot him a wide-eyed look, he added, "She's a journalist. She's really good at that stuff."

Olivia smiled discreetly.

"Alright, I'll mark Laurel down for that one," she said.

While Ryan and Olivia launched off into a debate about the pros and cons of bringing up religion—a topic Olivia argued would end up leading us into the mouth of a whole different beast that we didn't have space to tackle in a fifteen page paper—I made a note to myself to draft some lead-in questions to get a feel for how sensitive the topic of family was for Dulce.

Beside me, Bodie started to bounce his knee again.

It shook the whole table.

I cleared my throat. When he didn't get the message, I reached out—without considering how intimate the gesture might be—to cup my hand over his kneecap.

Bodie stilled.

"Thanks," he murmured sheepishly.

I nodded and pulled my hand back into my lap, balling it into a tight fist.

❖ ❖ ❖

Since I'd been the last to arrive at our meeting, I got stuck with the worst seat in the room. While my group mates could look through the glass door behind me and see out to the ocean of study cubbies stretched across the second floor, clear to the elevator banks, I was forced to stare ahead at plaster walls painted a grim shade of pea green.

So it was no surprise that I completely lost track of time.

It was dark outside when we emerged from Buchanan. The four of us walked down the front steps together, blinking hard as our eyes adjusted to the sudden absence of harsh fluorescent lighting.

When we reached the sidewalk, we lingered.

"See you guys tomorrow?" Bodie said, breaking through the hesitation.

"Tomorrow," Olivia confirmed.

"Dope," Ryan declared. Then, to Olivia, he added, "Let's roll."

He dropped his longboard onto the sidewalk, stepped up onto it, and pushed off the pavement with the toe of his cheetah print sneaker in one fluid movement.

Olivia scoffed in mock outrage and started after him, then turned over her shoulder and shouted, "Bye, guys!"

She waved, stacks of gold and silver rings winking in the orange glow of one of the lampposts lining the perimeter of the quad.

"See you tomorrow!" I called.

Olivia turned and jogged after Ryan, both of them snorting with laughter. He'd slowed himself to an easy roll. When Olivia caught up with him, she gave him a shove that nearly knocked him backward off his board. His arms windmilled and he wobbled for a moment before he managed to steady himself by latching onto her shoulder with one hand.

I watched Olivia tow Ryan along across the quad, acutely aware of the fact that Bodie and I were now alone together on the front steps of Buchanan.

He turned to me. I braced for an awkward goodbye.

Instead, Bodie asked, "Can I walk with you?"

"Uh. Sure. Yeah, no, of course."

For someone who prided herself on written communication, I was pretty useless at the spoken variety.

"You don't have to," Bodie added, the corner of his mouth twitching with a smile. "If you want to walk alone, I can, like, take a lap around the quad or something before I start—"

"No. No, we can walk together."

"Great."

"Yep."

We took off without another word, the silence punctuated by our footsteps (three of mine for every two of Bodie's) and the distant whir of sprinklers dousing the rose bushes along the side of Buchanan.

Walking home alone at night always necessitated a certain degree of alertness—valuables tucked away, no headphones in case someone tried to sneak up behind me, key wedged between my knuckles in case I had to get scrappy. Garland was a relatively safe town, but my freshman year there'd been a string of incidents involving a man dubbed the Booty Bandit. The name was only really funny until Mehri Rajavi came to my dorm room in tears because a thirty-year-old man on a bicycle had slapped her on the ass as he rode past.

Ever since, I'd been on high alert every time I had to walk across campus after dark.

The only time I ever really relaxed was if Andre was with me. Big softy that he was, being six foot four and a Division I athlete was usually enough to dissuade potential muggers and ass-slapping assailants.

Bodie had a similar effect. It was like having a bodyguard.

"Sky's clear tonight," he said.

I looked up. Stars winked back at us.

"Pretty," I murmured.

It was the elevator all over again—the stilted conversation of two people who had no idea what to make of each other. I tried hard to think of something better to say.

But I blanked.

We got to the end of the parkway and had to wait with a few other students and a food delivery guy on a bike (he'd probably come from the dorms) to cross the street. Someone had already hit the button. In my panic, the repetitive two-tone beeps sounded like chirping crickets.

I had to say something.

Maybe I could thank him for volunteering me to ask Dulce D'Leche that tricky question—although I hardly knew how to put into words just how much it'd meant that he'd vouched for my abilities. Still, I thought it might be a nice icebreaker.

But we were already turning onto my street.

And then, far too quickly, we were at my apartment building.

"This is me," I said, relieved to finally have something to say.

Of course, he'd been there four days ago. He knew where I lived.

I braced myself before tipping my chin up to look at him.

Bodie stood with his hands in his pockets and not a drop of tension in his shoulders. His eyes were clear and calm as the skies. He didn't look at all bothered that we'd spent the whole walk in what I'd thought was stilted, awkward silence.

I felt, suddenly, like I'd wasted the last five minutes in my head.

"Tell Hanna I said hi," Bodie requested.

My first thought was that he didn't mean it—say hello for me was just something people said to be nice. He'd carried my drunk best friend home, apologized for throwing a temper tantrum on the field, and scheduled a group meeting to which he'd come excruciatingly prepared to do his part. All nice things.

"Thanks," I blurted, "for getting the group together. It was good to go over all that stuff before we do the drag show thing."

Bodie shook his head.

"I didn't do anything," he insisted. "Olivia got us someone to interview, Ryan made all those slides, you wrote that kick-ass outline—"

"It's not that great."

"Better than I could do. I'm the worst writer."

I could've left it there. I could've laughed, said goodnight, and gone inside.

"What's your major, anyway?" I blurted. "Econ? Chemistry? Are you a science guy? I feel like you're a science guy."

There was a twinkle in his eye.

It was extinguished when he shook his head and said, almost apologetically, "I'm an IR major."

The international relations program at Garland was notoriously packed full of student-athletes and wealthy kids who were only getting a degree so that, when their company-owning parents got them cush jobs right after graduation, their diplomas could mask the nepotism.

I thought of the conversation I'd overheard between Bodie and Gordon at the athletics center and wondered how many football players Vaughn had singlehandedly funneled into the major.

Bodie seemed to take my silence as judgment.

"I'm thinking of switching to kinesiology, though," he blurted.

I knew, from the way he pulled his hands out of his pockets and stuffed them under his arms, that this was not something he told a lot of people. Gordon knew, obviously, and Vaughn had shot down the idea.

Why he was telling me, I didn't know.

"Kinesiology," I repeated.

"It's the mechanics of body movement. I've always kinda wanted to be a physical therapist. I probably won't have time for grad school and residency if I want to keep playing football after college. It's just something I've thought about."

Of course Bodie wanted to be a physical therapist.

Of course he wanted to professionally help people feel better.

"You could always go back to school after a few years in the NFL," I mused. "Pull a Hannah Montana."

"Best of both worlds," he said without missing a beat.

My smile was automatic.

For a very long moment, neither of us made a sound. We'd walked straight into an unspoken staring contest.

I started to squirm.

"I should go," I said, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder.

He nodded.

I jogged up the three steps to the front stoop. The halogen lamp on the ceiling overhead hummed like a wasp nest in the still night air. With a sharp twist of my key and a little brute force, I got the front door open.

I shot a glance over my shoulder.

"See you tomorrow," I said.

Bodie pressed his lips together and raised one hand in a half-wave, looking a little embarrassed to be caught still standing on the sidewalk outside my building. He turned, ducked his head, and continued down the dark street.

I watched him for a second before I slipped inside.

_________________

I have been waiting SO LONG to get to the group project chapters. This week will be lit. Nobody talk to me because I'll spoil my own book.

Also, yesterday I hit 100k words. I'm going to finish this book this week. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS BOOK THIS WEEK. It's been a ride. Lots of fun times (when the chapters fell together exactly as I imagined). Lots of very stressful times (when work was hell and words were a big no and all I could do was cry at the idea that somebody on Goodreads might one day rate my book one star) (like okay chill buddy we've got a long way to go before that happens). Can't wait to be DONE. Can't wait to share it with you guys.

Your friendly author,

Kate